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Republican officials are finally ready to acknowledge that US elections are, in fact, secure\u2014four years after they began falsely claiming otherwise and one week after their guy won at the polls. \u201cFraud and irregularity\u201d were \u201climited\u201d this time, House Speaker Mike Johnson<\/strong> said<\/a> during a Tuesday press conference. The election was \u201cfree and fair,\u201d confirmed<\/a> House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan<\/strong>, a prominent 2020 election denier and Ohio Republican, in a Sunday appearance on CNN.<\/p>\n Their confidence marks a sharp departure from even one week ago when President-elect Donald Trump<\/strong> and his allies were warning of widespread, if utterly fictional, electoral fraud. Trump spent much of the campaign season claiming<\/a> that Democrats were working to rig the vote against him, a natural extension of the violent election denial movement he seeded four years ago.<\/p>\n But those claims mysteriously dropped off when Trump won\u2014quite visibly<\/a>, in some cases. Now, even his allies and surrogates are cheering the security of America\u2019s voting system. \u201cI\u2019m happy to report to you that because of all the emphasis we placed on that, and because of all the attention the American people put on it, that I think we were able to limit to a high degree the amount of fraud and irregularity,\u201d Johnson said Tuesday. He particularly praised state legislatures that passed new election laws<\/a> since 2020. Notably, many red-state efforts to \u201csecure\u201d elections have mainly served to make voting more difficult<\/a>.<\/p>\n None of this means election denial is dead\u2014just dormant until the next campaign season. Even this election invited some skepticism and \u201cjust-asking-questions\u201d around the edges. Some election deniers on the right have used Kamala Harris\u2019s<\/strong> poor showing, relative to Joe Biden\u2019s<\/strong> four years ago, as further \u201cproof\u201d<\/a> of prior electoral discrepancies. On the left, some Harris supporters have run with the sore-loser playbook<\/a> that Trump first pioneered in 2020. Meanwhile, Johnson continues to claim without evidence that undocumented immigrants voted in some states; experts say that instances of noncitizen voting<\/a> are few and far between.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n